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M. Gregg Bloche M.D., J.D.

Co-Director of the Georgetown-Johns Hopkins Joint Program in Law and Public Health Professor of Law Georgetown University Law CenterEmail: bloche@law.georgetown.edu Discipline: Psychiatry, Law Expertise: Competition / Markets, Ethical Dilemmas and Allocation of Resources, Health Care Inequalities

Investigator Award

Rationality and Consent in the New Medical MarketplaceAward Year: 1996
Conflicts have erupted among patients, providers, and payers as a result of the market-driven transformation of the American health care system. These are playing out in coverage decisions by payers, selective contracting between plans and providers, tort liability cases, disclosure and consent issues, and the protection of health information privacy. Dr. Bloche develops an analytic framework to explore the moral, social, and institutional tensions underlying legal conflicts in health care delivery. He studies the problematic character and conflicting interpretations of rationality and consent as bases for ordering relations between patients, providers and payers. Building upon the paradigms of bounded rationality and relational contracting, he draws from the growing legal, economics and psychology literature on incomplete rationality and informal dispute processing mechanisms. His findings propose an array of approaches to the resolution of disputes arising from the growth of managed care.

Background

Gregg Bloche is a professor of law at Georgetown University, co-director of the Georgetown-Johns Hopkins Joint Program in Law and Public Health, and visiting fellow at The Brookings Institution and the Harvard Program on Ethics and Health. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship for 2005-06 to examine the roles of medicine in the public sphere. Dr. Bloche teaches and writes on U.S. and international health law and policy. His recent work has appeared in numerous academic and professional publications, including the California and Stanford Law Reviews, New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of the American Medical Association, and Health Affairs. He has also done commentaries for the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, National Public Radio's Morning Edition, and other media outlets. Dr. Bloche is a member of the editorial boards of several journals, including Health Affairs and the Journal of Health Economics, Policy, & Law. He has served on the Institute of Medicine's Committee on Understanding and Eliminating Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care, the Committee on Scientific Freedom and Responsibility of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the board of directors of Physicians for Human Rights. He has been a consultant to South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (on human rights in the health sector), the Federal Judicial Center, the National Institutes of Health, the World Health Organization, several House and Senate committees, and other private and public bodies. Dr. Bloche received his M.D. and J.D. from Yale University and his B.A. from Columbia University. Before joining Georgetown's faculty in 1989, he completed his residency in psychiatry at the Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center. He received several awards for research and scholarship as a resident physician and law student, and he was an editor of the Yale Law Journal.